1. Field
The present disclosure relates to network management. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for facilitating link aggregation from one device to multiple fabric switches.
2. Related Art
The relentless growth of the Internet has brought with it an insatiable demand for bandwidth. As a result, equipment vendors race to build larger, faster, and more versatile switches to move traffic. However, the size of a switch cannot grow infinitely. It is limited by physical space, power consumption, and design complexity, to name a few factors. More importantly, because an overly large system often does not provide economy of scale due to its complexity, simply increasing the size and throughput of a switch may prove economically unviable due to the increased per-port cost.
A flexible way to improve the scalability of a switch system is to build a fabric switch. A fabric switch is a collection of individual member switches. These member switches form a single, logical switch that can have an arbitrary number of ports and an arbitrary topology. As demands grow, customers can adopt a “pay as you grow” approach to scale up the capacity of the fabric switch.
Meanwhile, layer-2 (e.g., Ethernet) switching technologies continue to evolve. More routing-like functionalities, which have traditionally been the characteristics of layer-3 (e.g., Internet Protocol or IP) networks, are migrating into layer-2. Notably, the recent development of the Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) protocol allows Ethernet switches to function more like routing devices. TRILL overcomes the inherent inefficiency of the conventional spanning tree protocol, which forces layer-2 switches to be coupled in a logical spanning-tree topology to avoid looping. TRILL allows routing bridges (RBridges) to be coupled in an arbitrary topology without the risk of looping by implementing routing functions in switches and including a hop count in the TRILL header.
As more mission-critical applications are being implemented in data communication networks, high-availability operation is becoming progressively more important as a value proposition for network architects. It can be desirable to divide a conventional aggregated link (from one device to another) among multiple network devices, often belonging to different fabric switches, such that unavailability of one fabric switch would not affect the operation of the multi-homed device.
While a fabric switch brings many desirable features to a network, some issues remain unsolved when end devices are coupled to multiple fabric switches. Particularly, when an end device is coupled to multiple fabric switches using link aggregation, existing technologies do not provide a scalable and flexible solution that takes full advantage of a fabric switch.